Archive for October 2009

Many of you heard, read, or seen, talks about our coming upgrade. I guess it is time to start showing what is all the fuss about.

The new version is a major upgrade. Okay, let me rephrase that. It is a huge major big upgrade. There is so much new in it that it will not fit in one post, not even two. To be honest, I’m not sure how many posts it will fill, so, this is going to be the first out of N posts about the subject. For simplicity, (and so I also have some time left to work on getting this release out) I will also try to keep the posts short and focused around one topic at a time. Lets start.

At Digilabs we have three main applications. My Photo Books, and My Photo Calendar & Cards are the two applications we license to private label partners. We also have the DigiLab application which is used by professional photographers to order proof magazines, traditional photographic prints, and upload web galleries.

With the new version we combined all three applications into a single application. We combined the best part of each, rewrote some areas, fixed others to bring them all to the same level, and added new modules. Overall, the new application will support photo books, photographic albums, proof magazines, web galleries, calendars, greeting cards, postcards, trader cards, posters, gallery wraps, and photographic prints. The architecture is such that new products can simply be added in the future , such as gifting (mouse pads, or mugs) and more.

We have also improved the delivery packages and the installer. This is boring, i know, but wait until you read that. After combining all the applications together, merging things around and implementing a new content delivery architecture, the current installer is not the size of the sum of the three installers, not even half of that. It is mush smaller than what every application used to be separately. The size is not final yet, but for the combined application, we are looking at about 30-35 MB. (keep in mind that the current applications are between 80 MB – 120 MB each, and the total size of all three of them is around 250 MB, so 35 MB for all of them combined is quite nice).

To sum it up. A single application with more products, some completely new and outside of the traditional digital press domain of the current applications. All in a smaller footprint and download. One of the main reasons we could do this is our new content delivery architecture. More on the subject (and more interesting details with screes shots) in the next post.